Contents

Outing The Word

In the last two decades outing has come to mean making public someones
concealed sexual identity to out them from the "the closet", which
since the mid-1960s has specifically connoted secreted homosexuality.
It is hard to pinpoint the first use of outing in the modern sense.
In a 1982 issue of Harpers, Taylor Branch predicted that "outage"
would become a political tactic in which the closeted would find
themselves trapped in crossfire. "Forcing Gays Out of the Closet"
by William A. Henry III in the January 29, 1990 issue of Time introduced
the term to the general public. (Johansson & Percy, p.4)

The Act

The practice goes back much further. Outing was a common put-down
of Greek and Roman orators. Before the Christian triumph, sodomy
was not illegal in Greek or, most believe, in Roman law even between
adult citizens, but homosexual acts between citizens were considered
acceptable only under certain social circumstances. Both Romans
and Greeks sneeringly deemed the "guilty" shameful.

Replacing pagan tolerance, Christians
unequivocally condemned and persecuted sodomy. Congregations imposed
harsh penances or even excommunicated guilty individuals, reflecting
a Pauline prohibition enforced by imperial law from the fourth century.
Almost all the Church fathers abominated it and not even one permitted
it. Legal infamy via death or imprisonment for the sodomite persisted
through the Middle Ages and the Reformation to the Enlightenment,
and (except for areas governed by the Napoleonic Code) well into
the twentieth century under liberal as well as authoritarian regimes.
England only undid the death penalty in 1851.

The idea of coming out was introduced
in 1869 by the German homosexual rights advocate Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
as a means of emancipation. Realizing that invisibility was a major
obstacle toward changing public opinion, he urged homosexuals themselves
to come out. The dawn of the twentieth century ushered in a colossal
wave of gay rights work in Germany. Catalyzed by the infamous Oscar
Wilde trial of 1895, Magnus Hirschfeld, a secretly transvestite
Jewish scholar who believed in a "third sex", had formed
the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897, which further spurred
the movement; though, Hirschfeld opposed outing. Ivan Bloch, a German-Jewish
physician, besought elderly homosexuals in The Sexual Life of
Our Time in its Relation to Modern Civilization (1907) to come
out to their heterosexual family members and acquaintances.

The Harden-Eulenburg affair of 1907-1909
was the first public outing scandal. Left-wing journalists opposed
to Kaiser Wilhelm IIs policies outed a number of prominent members
of his cabinet and inner circle and by implication the Kaiser
beginning with Maximilian Harden's indictment of the aristocratic
diplomat Prince Eulenburg. Hardens accusations incited other journalists
to follow suit, including Adolf Brand, founder of Der Eigene, a
journal which advocated Greek style pederasty.

Hirschfeld revisited the topic in
his major work The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914),
discussing the social and legal potentials of several thousand men
and women of rank coming out to the police in order to influence
legislators and public opinion. (Johansson & Percy, p.24) In
1919 Kurt Hiller, an associate of Hirschfeld, argued that homosexuals
constituted a minority group, like those nationalities seeking states
for themselves.

Left wing journalists outed Hitlers
closest ally Ernst Rhm in the early 1930s, causing Brand to write,
"when someone - as teacher, priest, representative, or statesman
would like to set in the most damaging way the intimate love contacts
of others under degrading control in that moment his own love-life
also ceases to be a private matter and forfeits every claim to remain
protected hence-forward from public scrutiny and suspicious oversight."
(Brand, Adolph. "Political Criminals: A Word About the Rhm Case"
(1931) Reprinted in Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi
Germany, edited by Harry Oosterhuis, 235-240. New York, Haworth,
1991.)

Serving as an enlisted man in occupied
Germany after World War II, Henry Gerber learned of Hirschfelds
pioneering work. Upon returning to the U.S. and settling in Chicago,
Gerber organized the first documented public homosexual organization
in America and published two issues of the first gay journal, Friendship
and Freedom.

The first important American to
come out was the poet Robert Duncan living in San Francisco. In
1944, using his own name in the anarchist magazine Politics,
he claimed that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. In 1951,
Donald Webster Cory published his landmark The Homosexual in
America, exclaiming, "Society has handed me a mask to
wear...Everywhere I go, at all times and before all sections of
society, I pretend." Cory was a pseudonym, but his frank and
openly subjective descriptions served as a stimulus to the emerging
homosexual self-consciousness and the nascent homophile movement.
(Gross, p. 15) The decidedly clandestine Mattachine Society, founded
by Harry Hay and other verterans mostly ex-communists of the
Wallace for President campaign in Los Angeles in 1950, also moved
into the public eye with many gays emerging from the closet after
Hal Call, a right wing veteran battalion commander, seized control
in San Francisco in 1953.

In the 1960s Frank Kameny came
to the forefront of the struggle. Having been fired from his job
as an astronomer for the Army Map service for homosexual behavior,
Kameny refused to go quietly. He openly fought his dismissal, eventually
appealing it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and supported
others fired by the government. As a vocal leader of the growing
movement, Kameny argued for unapologetic public actions. The cornerstone
of his conviction was that, "we must instill in the homosexual
community a sense of worth to the individual homosexual," which
could only be achieved through campaigns openly led by homosexuals
themselves. (Gross, p. 18) His motto was "Gay is good."

After the Stonewall riots of 1969, swells of gay-libbers
came out aggressively in the 1970s, crying out, "Out of the
closets, Into the streets!" Reinventing the ideals of the pre-Hitler
Germans, some began to demand that all homosexuals come out, and
that if they werent willing to do so, then it was the communitys
responsibility to do it for them. Such radical measures provoked
opposition. Some argued that privacy should prevail, but others
felt it was better for the movement to protect closeted gays, especially
in the homophobic Church and the military. Despite activists best
efforts, most gays and lesbians were still unwilling to come out.

In the 1980's, the AIDS epidemic
outed several major entertainers, including most spectacularly Rock
Hudson in 1985. With increasing militancy and street theater performances,
Larry Kramer, like Kameny and so many other gay leaders, Jewish,
founded ACT UP, from which Queer Nation would later stem. At the
end of the decade, Massachusetts Congressmen Gerry Studds and Barney
Frank came out. Though many reviled them, they held their seats.
The first outing by an activist in America occurred on February
23, 1989. Michael Petrelis, along with a few others, decided to
out Mark Hatfield, the Republican Senator from Oregon, because he
supported homophobic legislation initiated by Jesse Helms. At a
fundraiser in a small town outside of Portland, the group stood
up and outed him in front of the crowd. Petrelis later tried to
make news by standing on the Capitol steps and reading the names
of "twelve men and women in politics and music who...are secretly
gay." (Johansson and Percy, p.188) Though the press showed
up, no major news organization published the story. Potential libel
suits deterred publishers.

OutWeek, which had begun
publishing in 1989, was home to the activist, outing pioneer Michelangelo
Signorile, who stirred the waters when he outed the recently deceased
Malcolm Forbes in March 1990. His column "Gossip Watch"
became a hot spot for outing the rich and famous. Both praised and
lambasted for his behavior, he garnered responses to his actions
as wide ranging as "one of the greater contemporary gay heroes,"
to "revolting, infantile, cheap name-calling." (Johansson
& Percy, p.183) Now many of his tactics are now seen as legitimate
political and journalistic techniques for uncovering and revealing
hypocrisy among those in power who are undermining equality for
GLB Americans.

Motives

Activists and journalists
out. Gabriel Rotello, once editor of OutWeek, called outing
"equalizing", explaining, "what we have called 'outing'
is a primarily journalistic movement to treat homosexuality as equal
to heterosexuality in the media...In 1990, many of us in the gay
media announced that henceforth we would simply treat homosexuality
and heterosexuality as equals. We were not going to wait for the
perfect, utopian future to arrive before equalizing the two: We
were going to do it now. That's what outing really is: equalizing
homosexuality and heterosexuality in the media." (Why I Oppose
Outing. OutWeek, May 29, 1991)

Their aim is not only to reveal
the hypocrisy of those in what Branch termed the "closets of
power" but also to further awareness of the presence of gay
people and political issues, thus showing that being gay and lesbian
is not "so utterly grotesque that it should never be discussed."
(Signorile, p.78) Richard Mohr noted, "some people have compared
outing to McCarthyism...And vindictive outing is like McCarthyism:
such outing feeds gays to the wolves, who thereby are made stronger....But
the sort of outing I have advocated does not invoke, mobilize, or
ritualistically confirm anti-gay values; rather it cuts against
them, works to undo them. The point of outing, as I have defended
it, is not to wreak vengeance, not to punish, and not to deflect
attention from one's own debased state. Its point is to avoid degrading
oneself." Thus outing is "both permissible and an expected
consequence of living morally." (Morh, Ricahrd. Gay Ideas:
Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon, 1992.)

Further, outing is not the airing
of private details. As Signorile asked, "How can being gay
be private when being straight isn't? Sex is private. But by outing
we do not discuss anyone's sex life. We only say they're gayAverage
people have been outed for decades. People have always outed the
mailman and the milkman and the spinster who lives down the block.
If anything, the goal behind outing is to show just how many gay
people there are among the most visible people in our society so
that when someone outs the milkman or the spinster, everyone will
say, So what?" (Signorile, pp.80-82)

Virtually all who take a position
on outing have qualified the limits to which it is permissible for
one to go. Between the extremes to out no one or to out everyone,
four intermediate positions can be discerned (Johansson & Percy,
p.228):

1) Hypocrites only, and only when they actively oppose gay rights and interests;
2) Outing passive accomplices who help run homophobic institutions;
3) Prominent individuals whose outing would shatter stereotypes and compel the public to
reconsider its attitude on homosexuality;
4) Only the dead.

Assessing to which degree the outer goes allows insight
into the goal striven towards. Most outers target those who support
decisions and further policy, both religious and secular, which
discriminate against gay people while they themselves live a clandestine
gay existence. "A truism to people active in the gay movement [is]
that the greatest impediments to homosexuals progress often [are]
not heterosexuals, but closeted homosexuals," said San Francisco
journalist Randy Shilts. (Johansson & Percy, p.226) One thinks
of Senator Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Francis Spelling.

Outing in the Clergy

The recent wave of pedophilia scandals
rocking the Roman Catholic church have outed more members of clergy
than most dedicated activists have been able to. Please see:

The most recent outing scandal to hit the
church flared up in New York, where New Jersey priest Bob Hoatson
accused Cardinal Egan, the archbishop of the New York Archdiocese
of not only covering up rampant sexual abuse amongst his clergy
but of also being a practicing homosexual, of which Hoatson claimed
he had personal proof. As of 3.06.06, the matter is unresolved and
will soon go to trial.

Outing in the Military

More service people have been discharged
per annum since "Don't Ask Don't Tell" has been in effect than before.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will soon strike down this ignorant,
costly, and unjust law. I believe that their recent upholding of
the government right to withhold funds from colleges and universities
that prohibit military recruiting on campus will lead to their dismissal
of this policy.

Outing in Textbooks

Activists have systematically outed the homosexual and bisexual
heroes of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance
and early modern Europe, whose sexual orientation the Church, the
Law, Academia, and Society had tried to ignore. Many continue the
attempts today, increasingly from all cultures and times. At a time
when sundry religious groups have acquired a voice over what is
written about them in American textbooks, many homosexuals want
the same representation. Not a single American History text used
in a U.S. secondary school or college today admits that even one
president, vice-president, cabinet member, governor, supreme court
justice or officer in any branch of the military is or was homosexual
or bisexual. Similarly European history textbooks fail to mention
a single saint, pope, cardinal, patriarch or any other ranking prelate
ever had sex with another male. For that matter, they rarely mention
any emperors, kings, statesmen or generals did either. The impetus
for change today is the same stated by Ulrichs in 1864: if important
people were outed, "the rich and the famous, the geniuses and heroes,
the saints and the self-sacrificers and benefactors of mankindthe
derogatory stereotypes can be discredited." (Johansson & Percy,
p.24)

Recent Political Outings

Gay rights activist Michael Rogers, recently outed Edward Schrock,
a Republican Congressman from Virginia. Rogers posted a story on
his website revealing that Schrock used an interactive phone sex
service to meet other men for sex. Schrock did not deny the claim
and announced on August 30, 2004 that he would not seek re-election.
Rogers said that he outed Schrock to punish him for his hypocrisy
in voting for the Marriage Protection Act and signing on as a co-sponsor
of the Federal Marriage Amendment.

New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey
announced that he was a "gay American" in August 2004.
McGreevey had become aware that he was about to be named in a sexual
harassment suit by Golan Cipel, his former security advisor, with
whom it was alleged McGreevey had a sexual relationship.

Support of Outing

Many gay rights activists defend outing as a tactic. The British
activist Peter Tatchell says "The lesbian and gay community
has a right to defend itself against public figures who abuse their
power and influence to support policies which inflict suffering
on homosexuals." In 1994 Tatchell's activist group OutRage!
named fourteen bishops of the Church of England as homosexual or
bisexual, accusing them of hypocrisy for upholding the Church's
policy of regarding homosexual acts as sinful while not observing
this prohibition in their personal lives. "Outing is queer
self-defence," Tatchell says. "Lesbians and gay men have
a right, and a duty, to expose hypocrites and homophobes. By not
outing gay bishops who support policies which harm homosexuals,
we would be protecting those bishops and thereby allowing them to
continue to inflict suffering on members of our community. Collusion
with hypocrisy and homophobia is not ethically defensible for Christians,
or for anyone else."

Criticism

Some gay activists, however, continue to disapprove of outing as
a political tactic, arguing that even anti-gay conservatives have
a right to personal privacy which should be respected. Steven Fisher,
a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocacy
group for gay and lesbian issues in the United States, commenting
on the Schrock outing, said he opposed using "sexual orientation
as a weapon." Christopher Barron, political director of the
Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing gay and lesbian Republicans
said: "We disagree strongly with the outing campaign, but we
also strongly disagree with President Bush's sponsorship of the
antifamily Federal Marriage Amendment."

Roger Rosenblatt argued in his January
1993 New York Times Magazine essay "Who Killed Privacy?"
that, "The practice of 'outing' homosexuals [sic] implies contradictorily
that homosexuals have a right to private choice but not to private
lives." (Signorile, p.80)